Sky spaces for writing

I first encountered James Turrell’s sky spaces here in the North, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. This place has particular significance for me. I grew up running around the wide open spaces and the Henry Moores and the lake, long before there was a visitor’s centre and paths through the fields. My mum was a student here in the 60s, when the space was home to Bretton Hall, a cutting edge training ground for the arts and art education.

In a full-circle moment, I brought my own group of Creative Writing students here when I moved back North after finishing my PhD and beginning a teaching post at the University of Leeds. I took them to write in the sky space that Turrell carved out of an old deer shelter on the estate. It’s a space with a powerful sense of grandeur and ceremony. You enter through a small archway and walk inside the hill, emerging into a chamber filled with sky.

This summer, I took my daughter back there. She immediately loved the feel of the space and we spent a long time just sitting, watching the clouds move across the sky. Even on a dull day, there was so much to notice about the light, which seems to reach down into the chamber. It’s a place where you can slow down and really look. Which, of course, is what writing can be too.

‘We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.’ - James Turrell

Last autumn, I was lucky enough to visit two of Turrell’s sky spaces in Arizona: Knight Rise at the Scottsdale Museum of Modern Art and Air Apparent at Arizona State University Campus.

Each was a very different experience. Each was about looking deeply, noticing, becoming more and more aware of my own being as a seeing, looking, listening being.

When we really look, anything can become a sky space – the light glimpsed through tree branches, the moon reflected in a puddle on a city pavement. It’s all good practice for writing.

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